![]() An African-American male is more likely to go to prison than to college. There are approximately two million people in prison in the United States, the majority of them black and brown. There is the skyward-facing Ja’Mal Green standing next to Jedidiah Brown, Chicago activists who have fought mass incarceration and police brutality in African-American communities. On each palm is a word, and together these words compose the shattering, almost stuttered sentence: again / don’t / shoot/ don’t /shoot / never. There are young palms raised high during a student protest, shortly after the Parkland school shooting. Every 15 minutes in the United States, a baby is born with neonatal abstinence syndrome. ![]() How can a baby’s eyes look this sad? It’s as if she were staring into a future that most of us dare not imagine. There is the disturbingly sad gaze of a baby girl being embraced by her mother, a victim of the opioid crisis. If we look even more closely, we realize these are in fact photographs about the future. Most of the crises, conflicts and natural disasters they capture aren’t new, but are ones dragged on from previous years, or are otherwise a resurfacing of symptoms of social ailments that have gone unattended for too long. If many of them seem, on closer inspection, like a recurring nightmare, it’s because yes, they are. What about art teaching us indignation? What about rage and historical responsibility?Īt first glance, these photographs are a retrospective of the year we are about to leave behind. Empathy is the minimum, but we need to step into the world with more than that. It is said of a particular book that it is written with “great empathy,” or that a certain film is good because it “teaches empathy.” Perhaps our standards should be higher. The word “empathy” has been tossed around a lot lately, which probably signals its actual absence in so many spheres of human interaction. And in doing so, we can ask ourselves: How do we react to what we see - not only in the moment we look at it, but in our daily lives? How does that reaction prepare us for the way we will face the future? ![]() The images here compel us to look closely, look twice, look slowly. Put together at the end of a year, though, their essence is restored. Scenes of the present become instantly the past. But it can lose much of its power that way - the power to seize us, to shake us awake, to interrupt the everyday. It tells us what the world looks like right at a given moment. NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY is often meant to be consumed instantly, on paper, on our screens, in endless scrolling feeds.
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